The decline and fall of England has already found chroniclers enough. Ledru Rollin and the Protectionists are agreed as regards the lamentable fact. G. F. Young, the chairman of the Society for the Protection of British Industry and Capital, believed it as firmly as his own existence. A similar opinion is more than hinted in the tedious History of Dr. Alison. At a still earlier period the same doleful tale was ever on the lips and pervaded the writings of Southey, the Laureate and the renegade. If these gentlemen are right, then the melancholy conviction must be forced upon us that England has seen her best days; that it will never be with her what it was in time past, when she bred up an indomitable race, when her flag of triumph fluttered in every breeze, and floated on every sea. We must believe that England’s sun is about to set; that, with its brightness and its beauty, it will never more bless and irradiate the world. Against such a conclusion we emphatically protest. We look back upon our national career, and we see that each age has witnessed the people’s growth in political power; that especially since that grand field-day of Democracy, the French Revolution, that power has gone on increasing with accelerated force; that it was to the increased ascendancy of that power that we owed it that we rode in safety whilst the political ocean was covered with wreck and ruin. If one thing be clearer than another in our national history, it is that our greatness and the power of the people have grown together. At a season like the present it is well to remember this. Prophets often fulfil their own prophecies. The Jeremiads of the weak, or the interested, or the fearful, may damp the courage of some hearts; and a people told that they are ruined, that the poor are becoming poorer every day, that the end of all labour is the workhouse or the gaol, that their life is but a lingering death, may come to believe that the handwriting is upon the wall, and that it is hopeless to war with fate.